Return to Healing: Common Sense Health Care

Alan and Andy talk about how medical school does not prepare students to be whole-person doctors, focused on numbers and multiple choice answers and slices of the body.  William Osler devised an ideal medical school at Hopkins before the Flexner Revolt took it down.  In the Osler model students work with community primary care doctors from day one and throughout their entire medical school curricu...

As two primary care doctors with a collective 75 years of experience, we understand the benefits of having a primary care doctor who develops strong relationships built on trust, who customizes care to each patient, who takes a patient-centric and whole-person view of care, and who is critical thinker looking beyond the protocols and drug-company dictated "truths."  Multiple studies have...

We look at the role of primary care in our health care system and discuss why it is the crucial ingredient to save lives, lower cost, and help people feel better and be healthier.  As we gravitate toward a technician-run specialized system that rewards expensive drugs, tests, and procedures rather than whole-person holistic care, we are devaluing primary care and valuing what makes our system wors...

There is no question that primary care is dying in this country, much to the detriment of our entire healthcare system and every person who utilizes it.  We talk about an article called The Eulogy for Primary Care that talks about why it's dying and missed opportunities.  Not only are no medical students entering the field, but those in it are burning out and having almost no time to actually...

We know that at the hospital medical students, residents, and hospitalists dive into a Flexnerian orgy of tests, treatments, and more tests.  Is this helpful?  We'll go back in time and look at Osler's dream at Hopkins before it became the poster child for Flexnerian medicine.   "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

People are losing weight on the new drugs, but at what cost?  First there is the financial cost: we're paying $35 billion a year for these drugs, and don't be fooled, all of us are paying.  While insurance pays nothing for nutrition or exercise, it gladly pays for this.  And these drugs are untested long term, with some horrific potential side effects if you take them for a long time or...

Alan and Andy discuss specialty care and its inherent dangers.  We tell about specific patient examples, why excessive specialization seems appealing but results in over-testing and over-treatment, and how we can instantly change policy to mitigate the damage from specialization.  Ultimately specialists are paid more to convince people they are sick and lead them down a road of testing, procedures...

Alan and Andy discuss cancer screening, focusing on breast and colon.  These screening tests can save lives, but just how much do they help you as an individual, what are the risks, and is there a point in your life that they are not helpful?  Screening for cancer is never as cut and dry as the pundits suggest, like everything in medicine it is cluttered by nuance and uncertainty.  We'll help...

We will discuss cancer screening in the next two segments, but will start with the PSA.  Why this test?  Because it is the poster child of what is wrong with screening.  One third of men develop prostate cancer in their lives, but few die of it.  The 10 year death rate is 1% and the 15 year death rate is 3%.  Because these cancers move slowly, and because the few that are lethal will kill you whet...

The Drug Industry was front and center in the creation of our health care industry.  The reforms that created modern healthcare in 1911 and beyond were predicated on developing a research infrastructure in medical schools and in the medical community to generate money for industry.  Nothing really has changed.  Now the drug companies have control over federal agencies like the CDC and FDA; over ac...

In our book, A Return to Healing, we dissect what is wrong with our health care system, and show how you as a patient can better advocate for your own health in a system that often deceives you for profit.  But too, we want to fix the system and we explore a feasible solution at the end of the book, one that is simple to achieve and one that would lead to massive financial savings at the cost of i...

In our book Return to Healing we explore the roots of our healthcare mess, and we dissect the many reasons that you are not being given the care you deserve.  In this audio we offer an introduction to the book and to this podcast. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

There is a code word in medical lingo that all doctors are supposed to follow: shared decision making .  In other words, doctors should provide you with information and then let you make the final decision about what to do.  But that rarely happens.  Far too often doctors hide behind their white coats and declare that there is only one right answer and that you must follow what they say, or else! ...

In the show Apple Cider Vinegar, the writers create a binary: the good and all-knowing doctors vs the charlatan nutrition gurus.  The gap is so wide between the two approaches that the reader is left thinking that in cancer, as in all things medical, doctors always have your best interest in mind and if they thought you should change your diet they'll tell you.  Doctors are not trained in nut...

Whether it is in attacking Kennedy, or in refusing to acknowledge what is dysfunctional about Medicare, Democrats use us vs them binary thinking to defend the medical system.  By finding easy targets that seem inane, or by inventing those targets by twisting the truth, the defenders of our horrific medical system prop themselves up by posing as the reasonable ones.  David Frum in the Atlantic did...

We all believe that cholesterol is so bad that we better measure it regularly and lower it by drugs.  Just ask your cardiologist: Got to get that LDL cholesterol below 70 or catastrophe will ensue!   But as we explain, this is a myth that germinated back in the 1950's and has been perpetuated and normalized over time.  Virtually all doctors believe in this myth and preach it to you.  The fact...

In our book, A Return to Healing , we explore how our healthcare system came to be the most expensive and worst in the world, looking back through history and focusing on our current mess.  As two primary care physicians with 70 years of collective clinical experience and having written many books and articles, we want to remove the curtain and show you how our system is not helping you to be heal...